| [ history ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): artistry (호연지기) 날 짜 (Date): 1999년 7월 2일 금요일 오전 08시 48분 33초 제 목(Title): 퍼온글/코오진 푸코와 일본,라캉과 일본 여기는 다양한 주제에 대하여 서로 전문적으로 논의하며 당신의 주장과 자료를 자유롭게 제시할 수 있는 열린 토론의 마당입니다. 실명과 아이디를 반드시 기입해 주시고, 상호 인격과 생각을 존중하는 토론 마당이 되었으면 합니다. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - 1999/06/27 (22:50) from 203.252.17.174' of 203.252.17.174' Article Number : 519 김성호 Access : 40 , Lines : 205 가라타니 코오진의 논문: 푸코와 일본, 라캉과 일본 The Power of Repression and the Power of Foreclosure: Foucault and Lacan vis-?vis Japan Kojin Karatani Part 1: Foucault and Japan 1 For this international conference on Foucault, taking place in Japan, I am supposed to speak about "Foucault and Japan." I do not take this to mean "Foucault in Japan"; in other words, it is not about how Foucault has been read in Japan and what significance his name has had in this country. Neither is it concerned with "Japan in Foucault," which is to say, how Foucault has thought of and written about Japan. Rather I would like to shed light on Foucault and Japan individually, by having "Foucault in Japan" and "Japan in Foucault" reflect each other. First, with respect to "Japan in Foucault." Didier Eribon touched upon the relationship: "Foucault was clearly very interested in Japan. How could he avoid investigating a civilization that, with respect to Western rationality and its limits, constitutes a sort of 'enigma, very hard to decipher'? But although he was intrigued by what he saw in Japan, it never became a lover's passion, as it did for Barthes and L?i-Strauss." (Eribon, Michel Foucault, 310) Before Foucault, there have been more than a few Western thinkers who dealt passionately with Japan--Heideggar, Koj?e, Barthes, L?i-Strauss, and so on. Of course for them Japan is a place which does not exist in reality--it is nowhere; it is a place outside the West onto which their critique of the West is projected. This use of outsideness has persisted since Montesquieu. But my intention is not to criticize their Japan as being a mere representation fostered in their culture and not the truth. That is self-evident. For that matter, even to Japanese, the West and even Asia are nowhere. Criticizing one's own culture in reference to an external nowhere is a common practice. It is different from excluding and looking down on the other in order to guarantee one's self-identity. But using the other as a mirror to initiate self-identity is not as far as it seems from using the other as a mirror to deny one's self-identity. They both are a way not to face the other: The other who is the opposite of the self or external to the limit of one's thought is not the "other," but the "stranger." While L?i-Strauss praised the savage mind, he must have never considered the savage land as his residence. I am not saying that he had to belong there. But only by imagining living there, the other begins to appear as a "relative" other--one who is neither fearful nor awesome, neither a total difference nor a total sameness. While Foucault was curious to know Japan, he did not love it. Which is to say that Foucault considered Japan not as nowhere but as somewhere--a place where it was possible for anyone, including himself, to live. For Foucault, Japan simply was not a desirable place to live. Of course the question is not either to live there or not in real life. It is said that Foucault thought seriously of immigrating to America. It would have been a big disappointment for him had he done so. Foucault criticized the type of intellectual epitomized by Jean Paul Sartre, but his critique made sense mainly in the context of France. In America it is unthinkable that an intellectual--if not a technocrat--can be influential outside the university campus. Seen in the American context, Foucault and Sartre are not so different with respect to their ways of being intellectual. In fact, Foucault, after the death of Sartre, and Derrida, after the death of Foucault, succeeded to Sartre's role of intellectual engag? The issue here is the difference: one group of intellectuals fell in love with Japan, while Foucault oriented himself toward America. Eribon names American gay culture as one of the reasons Foucault loved America. If this is the case, the same could be said for Barthes' Japan. "For Foucault the United States represented not only the pleasure of work but also, quite simply, pleasure. He savored the freedom available in New York and San Francisco, where reviews and newspapers thrive along with bars and nightclubs in homosexual neighborhoods. There, a vast gay community is organized and determined to establish its rights. And there, too, homosexuality is not limited to the young--unlike France, where the homosexual has to be young and beautiful if he wants to assert his sexual preference." (Eribon, 314-5) In France, it seems that gay people are accepted--or sometimes adored--only aesthetically. The situation is more so in Japan. There is a tradition of homosexual love dating back to premodern times; and today, transvestites and gays are stars on popular TV programs, and women cartoonists prefer to draw stories about male homosexuality. These phenomena create the appearance of homosexuality being widely accepted in Japan. The acceptance is nevertheless limited to the aesthetical domain. Old and ugly gay lovers are out of the question. In this situation it is rather that the aesthetic affirmation of homosexuality blocks the liberation of gay men and women as humans. What is common to those who privileged Japan as representation is that their stance is aestheticentric. Why Japan, but not India and China? It is related to the fact that the latter two have intellectual and moral principles independent of Western ones, while Japan seems to lack them. Motoori Norinaga defined the Yamato gokoro (spirit) as empathetic to the sorrow of things [mono no aware] beyond truth or falsehood, good or evil. What these Westerners see in Japan is precisely the aesthetic attitude constituted by nullifying intellectual and moral principles. In contrast, Foucault's stance of choosing America was, in a word, ethical. "In order to discover and invent new relationships, I argue that one should use one's sexuality. Being gay, that is, being in the process of becoming--and, to answer your question, I add that one must not be a homosexual, but try hard to be gay." (Foucault, Homosexuality and the Aesthetics of Survival, translated from Japanese translation. ) This is not an issue of gaiety proper. Foucault saw "liberty" in the real possibility of changing one's life style. Sartre, too, saw liberty in transcendence=becoming; that is, neither in being-in-itself nor being-for-others, but in "being-for-itself"--being not as to be but as not to be. It can be said that while homosexuality is a way of being defined either biologically or socially, gay is an act of choosing one's being for oneself. In contrast to Sartre's liberty, however, Foucault's was not metaphysical. His liberty was secular and political through and through. According to Eribon, Foucault was researching liberalism while working on his History of Sexuality. Eribon did not mention a word about what liberalism meant for Foucault, but I think that for him, the path to go beyond "Western rationality and its limits" was a type of liberalism that people mention frequently but do not scrutinize. Especially in France, where since the time of the absolute monarchy of the 16th century the polity has always been formed by a small group of bureaucrats and intellectuals, liberalism has never been the objective. In this respect, what Tocqueville pointed out concerning American democracy is still effectual. For instance, Hayek touched upon liberalism as follows: "This development of a theory of liberty took place mainly in the eighteenth century. It began in two countries, England and France. The first of these knew liberty; the second did not. As a result, we have had to the present day two different traditions in the theory of liberty: one empirical and unsystematic, the other speculative and rationalistic--the first based on an interpretation of traditions and institutions which had spontaneously grown up and were but imperfectly understood, the second aiming at the construction of a utopia, which has often been tried but never successfully. Nevertheless, it has been the rationalist, plausible, and apparently logical argument of the French tradition, with its flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason, that has progressively gained influence, while the less articulate and less explicit tradition of English freedom has been on the decline. This distinction is obscured by the fact that what we have called the 'French tradition' of liberty arose largely from an attempt to interpret British institutions and that the conceptions which other countries formed of British institutions were based mainly on their description by French writers." (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 54-55) The English and French traditions cited here do not totally correspond or belong to the real existent England and France. In fact, the significance of English tradition was understood not by the English but by those who came from the tradition of the opposite tendency--Tocqueville among them. Furthermore, the turns that both Marx and Wittgenstein took late in their careers were motivated by similar discoveries about English tradition. In England, Marx saw the social natural growth [Naturw?hsigkeit] and Wittgenstein saw the manifold game--the becoming that precedes formal and systematic construction. That is to say that those who manage to discover the significance of "experience" and "becoming" are none other than those who persist in the opposite--"reason" and "constructivism." The same can be said of Deleuze, who appreciated Hume: thus the pursuit of English tradition amidst French tradition. The same mechanism is evident in the work of Hayek, an East European immigrant; while he opposes liberalism to socialism, his concept of society is opposed to an organization with central powers and clear boundaries. It follows that his liberalism is social-ist in fact. French tradition, too, has had its own liberalism--appeared as the "socialism" of Fourier and Proudhon. Tacitly succeeding the notions of natural law and English economic liberalism (classical school of economics), this socialism gave ascendancy to society as a naturally grown coalition over state organization. Although this, too, conceived a rationalism inclined to willfully design an ideal society, it was still totally different from the kind of social-democratic planning of the welfare society--with communism at its extreme. Just as this socialism was once called anarchism, Hayek's liberalism is sometimes called anarcho-capitalism. Perhaps Foucault never spoke of his connection with the aforementioned tradition. But the gay culture he saw in America might be seen as an experimentation in the sense of Fourier. This has an aspect of American liberalism totally distinct from Reaganomics, which was eager to reinforce the gigantic state by waving the flag of liberalism. Or rather Foucauldian liberalism did not exist anywhere. We have to keep in mind that Foucault worked within the rules of French tradition and thus saw in America a practical way out of it. Once this context is lost, the meaning of Foucault's work is inverted. Foucault declined to explain Stalinism according to Russian characteristics--what Marx called Asiatic. What happened in Russia after the revolution, he says, was not Asiatic, but an application of the technology of control established in 18th century France. A Russianic/Asiatic absolute monarchy was totally unrelated to something like Solzhenitysn's The Gulag Archipelago. Therefore it is only a fallacy to criticize Stalinism under the name of French democracy since Rousseau. Rather, democratic France contained the impetus for The Gulag Archipelago. One should not forget that Rousseau despised the determination of will by the British representative system, preferring the "general will" reached among bureaucrats or the avant-garde party. In this sense, there is solid ground for Foucault to privilege the critique of the history of French discourse, and especially because it is concerned with power/knowledge. But what is at stake here is not simply the discourse but the characteristics of the French state apparatus. It seems to me that the majority of French thinkers, albeit criticizing the French state apparatus, remain in this bind. What Foucault sought to undermine was, simply said, the notion of power as a center--that which never exists but is always represented as if it does. It is this notion that produces the struggle against an imagined centralist power, and as a result produces a centralized power. By following this notion, we risk ignoring various local and spontaneous struggles against contradictions and subordinating them to central control, indefinitely sidetracking minority issues. In actuality, contradictions are always local events. There is no central power that permeates the whole, even in the most centralist state. Totalitarianism is, after all, a centralist power domination produced by those who oppose power as the center. Power is invariably represented as the one and only concentrated monarchy model or patriarchal model. This is true even in the Lacanian psychoanalysis that has dominated the French intellectual scene since the 1960s. But according to Foucault, this is a representation of power, and not real power, which exists totally differently. "Power comes from below; (. . .) One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together (. . .)" (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, p. 94) As an extention of the same stance, Foucault was against the notion of power as prohibition or repression. While, in psychoanalysis, the repression of sexuality assumes the status of ground, for Foucault, sexuality itself is already a product of repression. In his History of Sexuality, he attempted a Nietzschean genealogy of sexuality. But in the place of the Christianity Nietzsche targeted, he introduced the concept "Christian pastoral" or "pastoral power." In a lecture held in Japan he spoke about it: "To begin with, what does it mean for the people of the Occident to live in a society ruled by Christian pastoral? The being of pastors means that every individual has an obligation to save oneself. Therein, salvation is certainly a personal matter, but not one that can be chosen, either/or. In Christian society, there is no freedom of choice, whether I do or do not want to be saved; therefore, it is a sine qua non for every individual to ask for salvation. (. . .) In other words, the Christian pastoral has the authority to compel everyone to spare no pains to save himself. Salvation is an obligation." "The technology of internalization, that of awareness=consciousness, and that of being made aware of oneself--weakness, body, sex, flesh--these might be the most significant contribution of Christianity to the history of sexuality. Flesh (chair) is nothing other than the subjectivity of the body, and Christian flesh is nothing other than sexuality--sexual desire, the sexual act, and the totality of sexual phenomena--entrapped in the subjection (assujettissement) of individual to individual as the subject(ed). It is this subjection that was the primary outcome of the introduction of pastoral power to ancient Rome." (Foucault, "Sexuality and Power," translated from the Japanese translation) While psychoanalysis pronounces that the self is not a subject of unconscious but subjected to it, for Foucault it is psychoanalysis that succeeded the institution/technology of the confession of the Christian pastoral--that which produces subject and sexuality. To be a subject it is necessary to be subjected; at the same time, to be a subject it is necessary to be liberated from subjection. Accordingly, the movement of liberation from subjection ends up being subjected on another level. In other words, the movement of liberation from subordination results in a more severe subordination. Foucault sought a way out of the circuit. However, it is not precise to say that Foucault tried to find it by returning to pre-Christian Rome and Greece. On the contrary, he consistently looked to the future--not utopian, but realistic. "I think that the crux here is not so much if a culture without prohibition is possible, as if the system within which a society functions leaves a margin for individuals to change the system." (Foucault, Homosexuality and the Aesthetics of Survival, translated from the Japanese translation. ) This is basically liberalism, that is, a stance toward the restriction of power rather than the ultimate extinction of power. Speaking of change, Foucault is really expressing his America in this statement. But what meaning do Foucault's theories of power and activism have in the real America? In America, activist movements are always "molecular" (Deleuze & Guattari) and not centrist. That assumes that no stance or power permeates the totality, and intellectuals are unlikely to seize power. I am not implying that Foucault's theory of power is inappropriate to America. It is rather too appropriate in certain senses, for in a sense he was dealing with America all along. But I have to interpose an objection to the idea that there is no center for power. First, take Hume's notion of self and state. Hume advocated that the self is multiple; that there is no identical self/character; and that the self exists only as a custom. Then he likens the self to republic and commonwealth. "I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and gives rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. And as the same individual republic may not only change its members, but also its laws and constitutions; in like manner the same person may vary his character and disposition, as well as his impressions and ideas, without losing his identity." (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p.261) Like the identity of a character, the identity (or the center) of power does not exist as far as we only look at it from the inside. The center of power exists only vis-?vis other persons or other states. Whatever members of a state may think or feel about it, the state has a center vis-?vis other states. For instance, when a government changes, the new government has to assume the previous government's treaties. As Kant clarified, the subject as an identity of an individual exists only by and in the aspect of responsibility toward others. As far as the relationship with others is concerned, neither subject nor center is mere illusion. It is unlikely that Foucault, who once seriously thought of accepting the position of French ambassador, was oblivious to the dynamics of alterity. In reality, America dominates the world as a superpower. Stressing micro-politics too much results in ignoring the enormity of real politics. Foucault's theory of power often justifies the tendency to avoid a commitment to macro-politics, and gives politically inactive intellectuals the illusion of being politically active. It might sometimes imply that no matter what America is doing, they do not have to intervene; it becomes acceptable to think that the protest movement is what should be criticized as the power of knowledge. This is an extreme distortion of the discourses of Foucault and Deleuze that were put forth in France at the time when the communist party's authority was at its peak among intellectuals. In January 1992, after the outbreak of the Gulf War, Gilles Deleuze made a statement clearly against America's imperialist war. What did American Deleuzians do? 2 The Foucauldian notion of power without center seems, in a different way, to be pertinent to Japan, where power does not assume a patriarchal model. One of the reasons Foucault has been widely read in Japan since the 1960s is this association. But before dealing with this issue, I might better touch upon his lecture held here in Japan. According to my memory, he did not deal with Japan directly except for mentioning Maruyama Masao's Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan. This book is an attempt to reconstruct the philosophical history of the Edo period as a dialectical development from the Chu-tzu school. Likening the Chu-tzu school to the philosophia scholastica, Maruyama's book composes the intellectual history of the Edo period relying upon the Western model of the development of thought from medieval to modern time, yet also as a deviation from it. Why did Foucault deal with this book? Maruyama was an intellectual historian rather than a political scientist, albeit that among intellectual historians he was most sensitive about the issues of politics and power. Perhaps it was this quality of Maruyama that awakened Foucault to something that the history of Eastern philosophy commonly lacks. However, this book, which is written in the manner of Hegelian dialectics, must have appeared rather dubious to Foucault. Foucault persisted in rejecting intellectual history that is composed by way of contradiction in the teleological framework. In a word, his stance was one of choosing paradigmatic relations (parataxis) in the place of syntagmatic relations (hypotaxis). He kept the excessive discourses as paradigmatic events instead of arranging them into syntagmatic structures. That is to say that Foucault focussed his attention on the domains intellectual history had ignored: mental hospitals and prisons. But he did not utter a single word about such aspects of Maruyama's book in his lecture. Instead he stressed that the Chu-tzu school was different from the pastoral power. Perhaps Foucault saw in the Chu-tzu school an equivalent of technologies of the self beginning in the Greco-Roman period, because the Chu-tzu school's fundamental doctrine was to discipline others by way of physically disciplining the self. The book, which Maruyama wrote during World War II but published afterward, became very influential at some point, to the extent that it established the scholastic doctrine of Edo intellectual history. But today it is criticized by many younger scholars who read Foucault. In fact it is quite easy to criticize Maruyama as a typical modernist who constructed Japanese intellectual history based upon the model of Western modern history. But Maruyama was well aware that his dialectical composition of Edo intellectual history was an exaggeration, and that he had fabricated something that did not exist. Later, he surveyed the whole history of Japanese thought since ancient times and claimed that there was no principle that could order individual thought. Without the coordinate axis, all foreign trends of thought are unconditionally accepted and cohabitate in the same space of Japan. Because there is no confrontation between principles, development and accumulation are not possible. (Japanese Thought) None of the trends introduced from abroad are rejected, they simply cohabitate in a symbiotic space. New trends of thought are introduced without experiencing any challenges, and preserved until they are picked up again when needed. It follows that everything and anything is in Japan. As Tenshin Okakura said, Japan is like a reservoir or museum of the whole of Asian civilization. In Japanese intellectual history, there was no center which united various cohabitating systems. It was perhaps only formulaic Marxism that managed to construct a powerful axis of principle in this principleless morass; but with a proviso that it should not have "a human face," because it would have been easily gulped down and made to cohabitate in the discursive space had it had "a human face." For instance, there was a Christianity boom among Meiji intellectuals, and the majority of them converted with little trauma. In contrast, those who converted to Marxism, which was popular in the 1920s but oppressed in a crackdown, were left with intense trauma, almost like a religious experience. It might be said that Marxism produced a religious problematic. For this reason, Maruyama held Japanese Marxism in high esteem and saw it as that which offered an axis. Constructive and centralist thoughts, and the subjectivity established in them, are rather rarities in this country Japan. Therefore, no matter what kind, discourses which criticize subjectivity are easily, perhaps too easily, accepted in Japan. Such being the case, criticizing Maruyama by invoking Foucault is not only nonsensical, but also harmful. If intellectual history is isomorphic to power itself, Japanese power is isomorphic to Japanese intellectual history. No central power that controls the whole has ever been established there. Surprisingly, even when the state was Germanized after the Meiji revolution, no central controlling apparatus was established. Not even in the fascist regime of World War II, there was no strong centralist power like Hitler's or even a power equivalent to Mitterand's. That is to say that in Japan there is no clear distinction between state and society. Or to say it in reverse, there is neither state against society nor society against state. Japanese fascism--that Hitler is said to have envied--was neither state-nor society-sponsored, but a corporatism which still persists today in a non-militaristic manner. Epistemologically speaking, this implies that in this country there is no strict categorical distinction between construction (state) and becoming (society). It follows that every determination of will (construction) "just happens." Motoori Norinaga, a scholar of nativist studies [Kokugaku] in the late 18th century, privileged the above mechanism of non-principle as a Japanese principle as opposed to the Chinese spirit (kara-gokoro)--a rigorous obsession with principle and system that represses all delicate, ambiguous things. This becoming, however, is not like Nietzsche's becoming, which was stressed and functioned in a context where construction was dominant. After all, there is not much meaning in advocating becoming where there is no construction. The Japanese power structure cannot be understood by analyzing the representation of power based upon the model of overwhelmingly powerful patriarchal power. In Japan the center of power is always empty. Foucault opposed the notion of repression, which derives from psychoanalysis, but in Japan there is no repression or subject produced by repression. However it is indispensable to realize that empty power can also be oppressive. Barthes loved Japan passionately, because he saw an absence of repression there. As a liberation from repression, Barthes dreamt of the country as the absence of repression. But he did not have to think that the absence of repression/subject produces a power different from that of the West (and other Asian countries); and he did not. Because Japan was nowhere for him. But Japan was somewhere for Foucault. It is unlikely that he was aware of the Japanese power structure, the kind produced by the absence of repression. At least he did not love Japan, and it is for this detachment that I feel sympathetic to him. *This essay was presented at an international conference about Foucault held at Tokyo University in 1993. Part 2: Lacan and Japan 1 After World War II, Japanese intellectuals could resume their historical reflection only by asking the inevitable question, why couldn't their predecessors resist fascism and war? This wasn't simply a matter of ethical self-critique, but a must for understanding Japanese social and cultural structure. Among those who approached the question, Maruyama Masao was quickest and most penetrating. Instead of associating the nature of the Japanese prewar state with fascism in general, he analyzed it in contradistinction to Nazi Germany. While in Nazism there was a clear volition and subject, that is, a responsibility, he saw no such thing in Japanese war leaders. In the Japanese power structure, there is no identifiable subject of the voluntary act, no subject to take responsibility; accordingly, events are described just as an automatic chain reaction? leads to B leads to C. Maruyama called this a "system of irresponsibility,"and identified it as the structural characteristic of the Tenno system. "Thus the ruling class consisting of Tenno/bureaucrats/bourgeoisie had never become conscious of their responsibility. Strangely, it follows that in Japan the actual active drive that implemented war is not considered except for an explanation that the Tenno system itself caused the war. It is, after all, of utmost importance to elucidate this point in the context of social-sciences, isn't it? If not, the false reasoning of polar opposites comes to dominate: on the one hand, the monistic view that centralizes the subject of war into monopolistic capital and ascribes everything to it; on the other hand, the opinion that all the responsibilities fall on the young military officers--the field officer class--and everybody else is innocent. In short, in order to elucidate the issue of war responsibility, it is necessary to undo the mechanism, the deep pathology of the Tenno system itself." (Maruyama, "The War Responsibility of the Japanese Ruling Class," 1956.) But where did it come from? Although fascism unequivocally comes into existence at times of crisis in contemporary capitalism, fascism vis-?vis the origin of the Japanese power structure compels a consideration of the historical substructure dating from the pre-Meiji era. The problematic of the Tenno system inexorably appears as such a framework. But Maruyama was not the first to pose the question. Pre-war Marxists did too; for that matter, they coined the term "Tenno system." The argumentation is known as "the debate on Japanese capitalism" or "the debate on feudalism." The debate came into existence from strategical contradictions between the theorists of the communist party [known as koza-ha], which followed the thesis of the Commintern, and the social democrats [known as rono-ha], who opposed the Commintern's direction. This debate, the subject of intense scholarly discussion, persisted even after the collapse of the leftist movement before the war. The main participants were economists and historians, but the debate played itself out in variations in a wide range of disciplines. (For instance, in literary criticism, it was problematized in Kobayashi Hideo's "On Private Novels.") Maruyama brought the problematic of the Tenno system to public attention soon after the war, perhaps because he had been tackling it himself during the war. In an extreme simplification, the argument can be subsumed into the question why feudal remnants or old systems survive in a highly advanced capitalist state? While the koza-ha defined the Tenno system as literally a feudal remnant and thereby advocated the precedence of bourgeois revolution (to overthrow it), the rono-ha maintained that what appear to be feudal remnants are in fact parts of the capitalist relation of production and are destined to dissolve during the further developments of capitalism; thus the primary task for proletariats and peasants is to join force in the parliamentary system instead of targeting the Tenno system. At a glance, the position of the rono-ha seems accurate. The fact was that the communist party, that had committed to overthrowing the Tenno system in line with the Comintern's identification of the system with Russian czarism, ended up being repulsed by proletariats/peasants; instead of succeeding in organizing them into a force, it was collapsed by a government crackdown. But, in an inverted way, rono-ha also failed: it repressed the problematic of the Tenno system, or of the super-structure. The debate was strictly based upon Marx's thesis, and for this reason could never reach a solution because it was something that Marx never scrutinized. For, as far as reading Marx, the prospect that capitalist development will decompose the old social structure and ideology appears as apodeictic. This is because, for one thing, Marx took England as a model, and for another, as the economist Uno Kozo pointed out, Marx's main aim was to elucidate the "principle" of world capitalism. In reality, while a capitalist economy decomposes the old relation of production and ideology, it also conserves them to appropriate for its own survival. This is true in England as well. Attempts to elucidate the Tenno system by Maruyama and later by Yoshimoto Takaaki, cannot be reduced to Japanese peculiarity. The question as to why precapitalist, ancient myth functions in advanced capitalist societies has been unavoidable, at least in countries overtaken by fascism. For instance, in 1930s Italy, Gramsci grasped the super-structure as a problematic of cultural hegemony, and in Germany, the Frankfurt School tackled the same issue by introducing psychoanalysis. In the case of Japan, it was subsumed into the problematic of the Tenno system. That Maruyama sought to solve it in a social-psychological manner does not mean that he was not a Marxist; rather it means that he was simply not a Russianic Marxist. Maruyama knew that the Tenno system contained certain elements that could not be explained by general concepts such as pre-modernity and feudal remnants. These cannot be elucidated merely by analyses of the post Meiji Tenno system or political structure. (But this does not mean that the Tenno system is world historically exceptional and thus untouchable by theory. On the contrary, if it is at all exceptional, only the theory that explains it should be deemed universal.) Maruyama did not tend toward universalizing the problem, however. He thought it could be elucidated by questioning its origins. Surveying Japanese intellectual history since ancient times, Maruyama detected the origin in Shinto. He said, "Shinto, just like a long cloth tube, interwove itself with various religions that happened to be powerful in each era and filled the disciplinary gap. This "limitless embrace" and ideological cohabitation of Shinto epitomizes the tradition of Japanese thinking." (Maruyama, ) But what is he elucidating by saying this? His findings were the same as those described by Motoori Norinaga (the Kokugaku [nativist studies] scholar of the Edo period whom Maruyama criticized) positively as a differentiating mark from Chinese spirit. Maruyama simply considered what was positive for Motoori as negative. FInally, the same thing Maruyama problematized can be appreciated in the inverse; and in fact, the Japanese peculiarities nationalists claim are always related to these characteristics. Okakura Tenshin praised Japan as a "reservoir" and "museum" of the Asian civilization from the same standpoint. After World War I, Watsuji Tetsuo appreciated the space of cohabitation as Japanese religious magnanimity. The common trap in identifying cultural essence, be it nationalist or otherwise, is to assume a consistent autonomy within national history, and considering its relationship to the external world as contingent and secondary. For that matter, Western history, too, was constructed in the same way--as if the West were one self-same entity free from external and internal differences. On the other hand, Takeuchi Yoshimi, a critic and scholar of Chinese literature, saw Japanese characteristics in contradistinction to those of Asian nations. While most Asian nations, and China in particular, fiercely resisted the encounter with the modern West, in Japan there was no such reaction and therefore modernization proceeded smoothly. There was no 'subject' in Japan to call for resistance. That is to say that the existence of a coordinate axis causes stagnation--be it short or long--rather than development. According to Takeuchi, the secret of Japan's rapid progress was the absence of subject and principle, but he did not wonder what made the absence. Later, Maruyama sought to discover the characteristics of Japanese thinking in the "ancient substratum" of consciousness by analyzing Kojiki, The Ancient Chronicle ; and the characteristics, simply paraphrased, lay in the ascendancy of becoming as opposed to artifice/making. In pointing out this contrast Maruyama certainly thought that it was Western ascendancy that exhibited the artifice. In truth, however, it was not always so. F.M. Cornford argued that in ancient Greece, "becoming" was the dominant world view, while the Platonic idea that "the world is made" was secondary. The creationist view of the world was introduced from the more advanced Egyptian empire. What was, then, the dominant world view of European nations before they encountered Judeo-Christianity? In the substratum, "becoming" must have been more dominant than "making." After Christianity was introduced, becoming was totally repressed. The same was true in Asia: minor nations surrounding the empires, i.e., India and China, thoroughly repressed the previous trend of heterodoxy as they accepted cultural and political influences from India and China. It was not uniquely Japanese that becoming was more dominant than making in the historical substratum. Therefore, we have to question why the substratum of becoming was not repressed in Japan in particular. Nevertheless, in this case it is fruitless to try to explain Japanese characteristics in contradistinction to India and China, like Takeuchi did. Inasmuch as he scrutinized Japan? characteristics in itself without considering its connections with other nations, his analysis inexorably resulted somthing like Maruyama's "ancient substratum" or Motoori's "ancient way." In a strict sense, they did not omit the Japanese rapport with China and Korea, but in their thoughts, each nation--China, Korea, and Japan--was deemed a self-identical substance. Equally, they omitted the fact that the geopolitical rapport itself made the attributes Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Our objective is to analyze the relational structure of distribution: Chinese continent--Korean Peninsula--Japanese archipelago. I insist upon the importance of the particular geopolitical structure not because the particular area has a compelling influential power for the present and future world in the politico-economic sense, but because this structure, even if it does not exist anywhere else, has a certain universal significance in the context of world history. In Eurocentrism, Samir Amin questions the perspective of consistent, continuous Western history from ancient Greece to the present. Not only does it repress the fact that modern Europe could not have been born if not for the existence of the Arabian civilization for the medieval West, but also that Ancient Greece, claimed to be the origin of the West, was just an insular nation marginal to the advanced Egypt. Both of the two major trends in Western thinking; the poietic world view of Plato/Aristotle and the monotheistic faith in the Creator of Judaism, derived from Egypt. Amin did not consider Egypt as the origin to stress its originality nor because he is an Egyptian. According to him, while the cultural mechanism of an empire like Egypt--in his term, a "tributary society"--tended to be rigid and stagnant because of its completeness, Greece, a peninsular nation on the marginal coast, developed its own culture much more flexibly and freely because of its very incompleteness. Furthermore, Amin saw a relationship similar to that of Egypt and Greece between the Roman Empire and Western Europe, empires in Western Europe and insular England, and finally, between China and Japan. Amin argues that capitalism developed in those marginal nations that had only incomplete systems. To the list, I have to add the relationship between Europe and a gigantic insular nation, the United States of America. In these marginal nations, or insulars in particular, energy is not consumed in order to sustain contours; they accept anything from outside and use it to create something new, pragmatically and free from dogmas. Seen from this perspective, almost all attributes of Japanness can be explained as those of a Far Eastern insular marginal to Chinese civilization. Japanness is nothing exceptional; it is just one of the universal phenomena in world history. In this viewpoint, Japan should be compared with England rather than Germany, France, or China. And the most significant difference between England and Japan is that, while England is facing the European continent directly across the channel, Japan has Korea between itself and the continent. Because of its direct exposure to the continent, England has borne many foreign invasions, since even before the Norman Conquest; and the stains are still visible in its problematic relationship with Ireland. In contrast, Japan was protected. Since ancient times, various kinds of people have immigrated to Japan, but there have been no major military invasions except for one by the Yamato Kingdom, the ancestors of the present Japanese Emperor. The Korean Peninsula has prevented China, Mongolia, and Russia from reaching Japan; Korea dammed up the military interventions. Mongolia, which had conquered a large territory from China to Arabia in the 14th century, fought for over thirty years to rule the Korean Peninsula. It had to give up on Japan, not because of kamikaze [God's wind] or typhoons, but because it had consumed all its might in suppressing the resistance in Korea. The barrier also worked the other way around--affecting the movement from Japan; although Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a 16th century war lord, attempted to conquer the Ming with his military power, which was superior at that time, he gave up his ambition because of the strong resistance he met in Korea. History points out the harassment of Wako [Japanese pirates] as one of the main causes for the fall of Ming dynasty. Taking this in account, Toyotomi might have succeeded in conquering the Ming, if not for Korea's resistance. Korea has definitely determined Japanese political and cultural formations. While Korea has always struggled to sustain its artificial national contour against foreign invasions, Japan has been able to rely on the natural contour of the ocean by considering it as the national contour. This is another reason that, as previously mentioned, there is a vague distinction between state and society in Japan, and the reason there has never been a central sovereign power. It was showcased in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East held after the World War II, where, as Maruyama pointed out, there was no visible subject who would or could take responsibility. The Tenno system has survived in Japan neither because of its abyssal mythological power nor because of the remnant savage mentality as anthropologists often point out, but simply because Japan has never been ruled by foreign forces, thanks to Korea. Within the protected disposition, it so happened that every political power stabilized its rule by resorting to the authority of Tenno's historical continuity, instead of seizing absolute hegemony under its own name. The novelist Sakaguchi Ango wrote about Tenno: "Although the Tenno system has always been a consistent system throughout Japanese history, Tenno's authority has been just a tool for its users and never existed for itself. Why did the Fujiwara clan and Shogunite need the Tenno system? Why did they not themselves take the place of the monarchy? Rather than taking the hegemony by themselves, it was much more convenient to show obeisance to the Tenno system. Rather than ordering the world themselves, it was more economical to have Tenno order the world and then simply follow. They were well aware of it. (. . .) Calling oneself God and demanding people's absolute obedience is impossible. However, prostrating themselves in front of Tenno and making him God made it easy for them to command submission of the people. Therefore, they helped Tenno to the throne whenever possible and prostrated themselves in front of him; they imposed authority upon people and ordered whatever was convenient to themselves by calling on Tenno? authority. This is not only a deed of Fujiwara or the Samurais. Look at this present War!" (Sakaguchi, Theory of Decline II) It was not only Japanese rulers but also the American Occupation Army who appropriated Tenno's authority. To counter the USSR's strategy, America had to stabilize Japan quickly, and therefore it deliberately exempted Tenno from his war responsibility. Consequently, Japan revived as an economic super power with the ?tructure of the Tenno system?intact. I would like to stress that it is again thanks to the existence of the Korean Peninsula. Because of this, the post-war Japanese constitution--represented by "Tenno as the symbol system" and the renouncement of ever engaging in war--has survived. Had it not been for Korea as a defense against the advancement of China and USSR, it could not have survived. On the other hand, Korea's politico-cultural gestalt was determined by its disposition of being in-between China and Japan. That the existence of Korea explains that there has not been repression in Japan also has a flip side: In Korea there has been intense repression; the repetitive invasions of foreign powers enforced repression, which then strengthened subjectivity. This basic relational structure aside, if one considers the history of each nation individually first and then their reciprocity, one ends up essentializing cultural essences, as always. Korea, a marginal nation bordering on China and directly exposed to its political and cultural oppression, has developed a tendency toward principle and system, in a sense, much more so than China. A Korean literary critic, Che Onshiku recounted this tendency: "Frankly speaking, our intellectual history has contained a radicalist tendency resulting from certain irregularities. The intense seduction of a narrow minded ideological domination distinguishes orthodoxy and heresy, condemns as a rebel even the slightest deviation from the orthodox, and hastens to destroy it. Chon Ie (1587-1638) once deplored the situation: For Chinese scholars, there are orthodox studies, Zen and Tao. Some study Chu-tzu, while others study Wang Yang-ming. Indeed, paths of doctrines are not one. But in our nation, those who admire books and read them, be they intellectual or not, just memorize the lines of Chu-tzu as if it were the only doctrine. (. . .) Hearing the reputation that Chu-tzu's teaching is highly admired, they just pay it lip service in worship and praise it in appearance. When there are no minor studies, how can an orthodox exist?"(Che Onshiku, National Literature of Korea) In fact it was 16th century Korean scholars of the Li dynasty who, under an intense Confucianist policy, revived the doctrines of Chu-tzu, which had long been dying out in China. The Chu-tzuism that the Tokugawa Shogunate adapted as an official ideology was nothing other than this Korean version. Korean scholars who came to Japan as missionaries throughout the Tokugawa period (1603-1867) had been teaching it. After the Meiji Restoration, this scholastic rapport was forgotten. Even Maruyama Masao's A Study of Japanese Political Thinking ignored the Korean influence. (Though, later in his introduction to the English edition, he amended this point.) Even China's Confucianism and Chu-tzuism were not as strict as those in Korea. Keeping this in mind, we finally realize that what Motoori Norinaga called the Chinese spirit was in fact the Korean spirit. In any event, the objective of our pursuit should not be in the differences between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese thought, but the ways they were formed in their historical reciprocity. 2 It is clear that to elucidate the Japanese system--of the Tenno system in a broad sense--we have to see it in the context of the Far Eastern geopolitical structure. As an absurd example, there is a common tendency to explain the Japanese way of thinking as dependent on Japanese grammar: i.e., there is no subject in Japanese sentence; according to whom the message is addressed, the case of the first person changes; and so on. These characteristics are also common to Korean. Obviously, ahistorical linguistic determinism does not work. Nonetheless, it is still necessary to begin with language, instead of Volksgeist or the structure of the national mentality, when we try to assess Japan-ness. It is language as ?riture. Maruyama retrospected to ancient historiography in his attempt to elucidate the ancient substratum of Japanese thinking, but when he analyzed the terminology of the text, Kojiki [The Ancient Chronicle], he paid little attention to its ?riture. While he was concerned with content, he did not problematize the form. In other words, he did not question the historicity of the ?riture by which history is constructed. Kojiki, which is known to have been written in man'yogana--phonetically reappropriated Chinese ideograms (kanji)--was in fact written after Nihon Shoki [The Chronicles of Japan], which had been written in straightforward Chinese. The idea of writing history itself had come from China and Korea. It seems valid, therefore, that Kojiki was first written in Chinese and then translated into Wago [ancient Japanese]; this translation would not have been possible without the man'yogana. The difference between Korea and Japan with respect to their confrontations with China is most explicit in the way they introduced kanji into their own writing systems. The difference is not one among many, but the one through which all other differences are expressed, and the one that is presently producing every difference. In the ancient Far East, only China had letters. In China, culture --written in ideogram as "literation"--was equal to using kanji--the ideogram meaning Han's letter--and the sine qua non for marginal nations to develop culture was to first accept it for their own writing. However, it was difficult for nations whose languages are agglutinative to adopt kanji from Chinese, which is an isolating language. Kanji is not a hieroglyph; it is both ideographic and phonogramic. Therefore, those nations that introduced Chinese ?riture in ancient times adapted it intact, but used it phonetically to indicate their own languages. There are a number of languages that fabricated letters out of kanji within the Sino cultural sphere, including the letters of Annam, Sibo, Chi-dan, N?hen, or Idu in Korea, and Japanese. It seems that the use of man'yogana, that appeared around the 7th century in Japan and was used to write Kojiki and Man' yoshu [The Selection of Ten Thousand Leaves], was invented in Korea. The phonetic use of kanji was brought to Japan by Korean immigrants: even the use in Japan seems to have been conceptualized by Korean immigrants. Then, around the 9th century, both the kana syllabary and katakana [the stylistically squared form of kana, used for transcribing foreign words] were spontaneously developed by simplifying the phonetic use of kanji (man'yogana) that had already been assimilated. In Korea, the hankul alphabet that is used today was created in the 15th century. In Japanese the phonogram was developed spontaneously rather than designed: the phonetic syllabary, kana, was a transformation of man'yogana--this was possible in part because Japanese has relatively few vowels and consonants, and is open syllable--all sounds end with vowels or diphthongs. In contrast, in Korean there are many vowels and consonants, so that a method to combine them--like an alphabet--had to be designed. The most explicit difference between Japanese and Korean is that in Japanese, kanji is read two ways--phonetically [on], a reading that is similar to the Chinese sound, and semantically [kun], that is, a reading using native Japanese sounds, while in Korean, kanji is read only phonetically [on] in imitation of the Chinese sound, and never semantically. To be more precise, it is likely that in ancient Korea, kanji was also read semantically [kun], and this way of reading was imported to Japan. At the time when the hankul alphabet was designed, however, kanji was read only phonetically [on]. Furthermore, while the Japanese phonetic reading of Chinese adopted sounds of various Chinese dialects, Korean adopted only one way of reading. In the postwar era, both North and South Koreas intended to reject Chinese ideograms and use only the hankul alphabet. They were able to drop kanji completely because the hankul alphabet can present kanji's signification in one block/letter. In Japanese, if kanji's sounds were all transcribed in kana, sentences would become too long for the economy of reading/writing. What does the kun reading of kanji using Japanese native sound indicate? First and foremost, it assumes an internalization/translation of the foreign ?riture, kanji. Today Japanese are not conscious that they are reading Chinese ideograms with their own sounds, but they rather think that they express Japanese by using Chinese ideograms. For Koreans, the sense of kanji is the opposite: it remains external because it is read only in imitation Chinese sounds [on]. Intellectuals persisted in reading and writing in the foreign ?riture, kanji, even after the invention of the hankul alphabet. But in Japan, ?riture of the kanji/kana mixture came to be standardized around the 12th century, and Chinese writings came to be read/translated as/into Japanese. As a result, there were far fewer Japanese than Koreans who could write formal Chinese, but the literate population increased. Second and more importantly, kanji, though absorbed into Japanese, remains something external. In Japanese, the part written in kanji is always deemed foreign and abstract. But beginning in the Meiji era, the cohabitation of native and foreign elements became much more complex. When Western concepts were translated into Japanese, they were first translated into Chinese ideograms (and this translation, the first importation of Western concepts into the Far East, permeated Korea, which was at that time colonized by Japan, and also China, taken there by by innumerable Chinese students who were sent to study in Japan after the Sino-Japanese War), but were also transcribed by katakana. Having been used as a support for reading Chinese texts, such as Buddhist sutras, katakana was appropriate for inscribing foreign words. These days Western concepts are rarely translated, and mostly just presented in katakana that indicates imitation of Western sounds. In speaking, the foreignness of foreign words does not come into consciousness, but in writing, being written in katakana makes the foreignness explicit. Insofar as they are written in kanji or katakana, the foreignness of imported terms is sustained. Terms written in kanji and katakana come to be imbued with a certain special value because of their foreignness, but at the same time they invite a certain repulsion. No matter how much these letters are domesticated into the system, or no matter how necessary they are for communication, they are tacitly and also materially discriminated from the domain of Yamato kotoba [authentic Japanese], the domain which is supposedly the most established and accordingly the most natural Japanese. But Yamato kotoba is not factually the most ancient, original Japanese, rather it indicates words whose origin has been forgotten and which were therefore naturalized so as to be inscribed by hiragana. Japanese is the only language whose ?riture presents the origins of words explicitly by the distinction of letters: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. The tripartite division has been sustained for more than one thousand years. Indifferent to this feature, one cannot understand Japanese political and cultural institutions, not to mention literature, because it is this ?riture that has constructed them. As I mentioned earlier, Maruyama argued that although any foreign trend of thinking is accepted in Japan, these imports just cohabitate without serious confrontations that could reveal a potentially radical problematic of the internal core. This tendency is precisely materialized in the system of letters. Those concepts that are introduced as kanji and katakana are automatically deemed foreign, that is, they have nothing to do with the Japanese cultural essence. It is thanks to this immune system that anything whatsoever can be introduced. Any foreign concept can be interiorized in Japanese without affecting the essential core, and thus accepted without causing resistance. There is no major confrontation between the same and the other. The foreign elements are put aside in the concessions. In this way, every foreign trend has been stored, intact, in Japan. Concerning the problematic of Japanese ?riture, I would like to invoke Jacques Lacan's account of Japan. Lacan seemed to have been enormously intrigued by the Japanese use of letters, and he wrote about it at least three times. In the preface for the Japanese translation of ?rit, he claimed that those who use letters like the Japanese do not need psychoanalysis. He claimed that he hoped to make Japanese readers close the book after reading the preface. What most interested Lacan was that Japanese read the Chinese ?riture, kanji, with their own sounds [kun]. "For humans who truly speak, on-yomi is convenient enough to annotate kun-yomi. Seeing the pair of pliers that joins them coming out hot like a freshly baked waffle, this is the true happiness of people made by them. No other nation shares the luck of speaking Chinese within their own languages, unless they are dialects. More than anything else--and this point should be stressed--no other nation ever borrowed letters from a foreign language to the extent that they incessantly make palpable the distance from thinking to spoken language, namely, from unconscious to spoken language. When taken up among international languages that happen to be considered as appropriate for psychoanalysis, a knotty deviation might be discovered in the language. If I may say so, risking a possible misunderstanding, it is a daily affair for those who speak Japanese to tell the truth by the mediation of a lie, that is to say, without being a liar." What did he mean by saying that " on-yomi is convenient enough to annotate kun-yomi"? That Japanese sound can be directly transferred to the use of kanji. In other words, aside from its sound, one can receive the meaning of kanji visually. From this Lacan drew the conclusion that Japanese did not need psychoanalysis, this seemingly based upon Freud's view of the unconscious as a hieroglyph. Psychoanalysis brings the unconscious into consciousness, which is equal to vocalization of the unconscious; more precisely, it is the decipherment of the hieroglyph inscribed in the unconscious. In Japanese, however, the "hieroglyph" is present in consciousness too. According to Lacan, in Japanese the distance from the unconscious to the spoken language is palpable; thus there is no repression in Japanese. Because they always expose their unconscious (hieroglyph)--they are always telling the truth. Lacan did not attempt to explain the Japanese mentality. He was interested in Japanese because their ?riture points to the limit of psychoanalysis. It was in the same sense that Freud assessed the limits of psychoanalytic therapy in schizophrenics--or narcissistic neurotics, to use his own term--for whom the transference to the doctor does not occur. In this context, Lacan posed the concept of "foreclosure," which is distinct from repression--it is the foreclosure of primary repression, namely, of castration. Castration forms the subject by repression, causing the subject to be dogged by neurosis. On the other hand, the foreclosure of castration prevents the full formation of subject, causing psychosis (schizophrenia). The difference between Korea and Japan that I have been dealing with should become clear via the psychoanalysis of literation. In Korea, when people accepted kanji, castration was inevitable. And the situation has not changed today even after the abolition of kanji. Rather their struggle to abolish kanji was the result of the repression. This is a common phenomenon when one civilization encounters another, more advanced one. Lacanian castration is the inevitable consequence of intervening in the symbolic order, namely, the world of articulated language (=culture). But things were different in Japan. The Japanese kun-yomi is a peculiar way of intervening in the symbolic order, without being totally internalized. In Japan, the foreclosure of castration occurred via the formation of ?riture. If there is anything on earth that can be deemed Japaneseness, it is this system. 3 The aspect of Japan I would like to scrutinize has nothing to do with national mentality and ancient history. The tripartite ?riture of kanji, hiragana, and katakana continues to exist and function. Rather it should be surprising that Japanese actually live with such a strange writing system at the very core of all other ideologies and institutions, rather than it being secondary or merely an instrument. However we should carefully avoid idealism in the form of linguistic determinism which substantializes a certain mentality, thought, and culture by essentializing a certain historical writing system; this inevitably leads to assuming self-identity without external reciprocity. A novelist of the Taisho era, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, seems to have sought the ideological paradigm of his contemporaries in a sort of historical substratum. In his novella "The Smiles of Gods," a Japanese spirit appears in the dream to a Jesuit Missionary to warn him that every foreign thought that came to Japan, including Buddhism, Confucianism and so on, had been unequivocally remolded. "Just listen to me. It was not only Zeus who came all the way to this country: Confucius, Mencius, Chang-tzu, and many other philosophers migrated to this country, especially from China. And it was at the time when this country was newly born. Aside from Tao, Chinese philosophers brought many things such as the silk of Wu and the gems of Qin. Nay, even a much more invaluable thing than these treasures--miraculous letters. Yet, has China managed to conquer us with these things? Look at the letters, for instance. Instead of conquering us, the letters were conquered by us. I used to have a friend among the natives, a poet called Kakinomoto no Hitomaro. (. . .) But I must speak of letters rather than his poetry. In order to write that poem, Hitomaro used Chinese letters; but it was used not for meaning, but for inscribing pronunciation. Even after the character that signifies ship--zhou--was introduced, for us fune--ship--always remained fune. Otherwise, our language might have become Chinese. This was thanks to the power of the Gods of our country, certainly not Hitomaro." "Even Zeus could be a native of this country one day. Both China and India were changed. The West must be changed. For we exist in the trees, in the shallow streams, in the wind traversing the rose blossoms, in the moonlight remaining on the temple wall. We are everywhere anytime. Watch out. Watch out." Although he invoked a situation surrounding Jesuit missionaries of the 16th century, Akutagawa could be alluding to what had happened to Christianity in the late Meiji era and what would happen to the Marxist movement, which was at its peak at that time and, in a sense, was a threat to him. What is most noteworthy is that Akutagawa shed light on the problematic of letters while naming the foreign religions and thoughts that had been absorbed and nullified in Japan. For instance, the following comment by a contemporary Jungian psychologist, Kawai Toshio, speaks to the same metaphor as Akutagawa's but only under the shroud of science, without Akutagawa's keen historical sense. "Well reputed today is the Japanese skill in introducing foreign cultures. Foreign thought and arts are immediately imported and made trendy. But it is only momentary. The trendy thoughts which have risen up the ladder suddenly fall and disappear. Then, a new trend appears. In such a manner, Western thought and art appear to stand together in competition, but are all Japanized when going through the womb of the Japanese earth mother. It is related to the statement of Isaias Bendasan that in Japan there is only one religion, that of Japan." (Pathology of Japan? Matrilineal Society) "For Westerners, whether the Japanese have egos or not seems to be a point of uncertainty. A foreigner told me that he had hard time negotiating business deals with Japanese because of the vagueness of individual judgment and responsibility. Japanese are slow to make a clear decision, often saying that s/he would respond after speaking to their superior. If this foreigner went directly to the superior, the answer would be that he would have to speak to his staff. The foreigner felt totally lost." (Principles of Matrilineal Japanese Society) Kawai is repeating what has been pointed out by Maruyama Masao and many others. The second paragraph indicates the omnipresence of the "system of irresponsibility," revealed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East as described by Maruyama. What causes it? According to Kawai, it comes from the fact that Japan is a matrilineal society. But in both historiographical and sociological senses, it is a very ambiguous concept. Furthermore, he does not consider any people other than Westerners and Japanese. Without any historical consideration, Kawai simply explains the status quo psychologically. If one has to invoke the womb of the Japanese earth mother, it would be better to ascribe everything to a Japanese spirit like Akutagawa. But, worse still, Kawai appeals to the "structure of the Japanese ego." "In consideration of these points, I have schematized quite boldly the psychological structures of Japanese and Westerners. [. . .] In the case of Westerners, ego exists in the center of consciousness; thanks to this, there is a unity: the ego is connected to the self that exists in the depth of mind. In contrast, in Japanese, even the boundary between consciousness and unconscious is not clear. Because the structure of consciousness is formed around the self that exists within the unconscious, it is unclear whether the structure of consciousness has a center or not." (Principles of Matrilineal Japanese Society) There is no need whatsoever to conceptualize "structure of the Japanese ego." The duplicity of ego pointed out by Kawai can be explained by on-yomi and kun-yomi. In fact, even Lacan, who did not know much about the history of the Far East, could spot it. As I have mentioned already, the Japanese characteristics must be analyzed in the geopolitical relational structure: China--Korea--Japan, rather than in comparison with the West. But this characteristic is something that does not linger on the level of consciousness; for this reason, discourses related to "nationality" or historical fact continue to be spoken of as proxies as always. Lacan speaks further on Japaneseness: "In other words, as in all other countries, [in Japan] the subject is divided by language; one side is satisfied by references to ?riture--kanji--while the other side is satisfied by parole, the spoken language itself. Perhaps it is this fact that gave Roland Barthes that sense of intoxication that the Japanese subject does not have anything to hide in all of its activities. He called his essay, The Empire of Signs, but what he really meant was the 'empire of semblance'." (lituraterre, in Revue: Literature n3, October, 1971) This is to say that there is no repression in Japan. Which does not mean in the least that the society is free. With respect to Japan, we have to consider the power engendered by "foreclosure," which is different from that engendered by "repression." As mentioned earlier, Foucault opposed the idea of liberation from repression, because the idea itself is the product of repression. He thought that we should first be liberated from the notion of repression in order to be liberated from repression. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari saw possibility in the schizophrenic as they deconstructed the psychoanalytic framework of neurosis or paranoia. These are the problematics particular to a culture where repression is deeply embedded. In the power structure Maruyama called the "structure of the Tenno system," there is no subject that assumes the center. There is no center of power. The center of power is the "place of nothingness" in the sense of Nishida. Therein "the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions" in the sense of Foucault are exposed bare, without being repressed. Looking at prewar fascism in Japan, this mechanism is evident. Even in the corporativist polity [yokusan taisei] solidified in 1940, there was no particular center or unitary conformity. It is therefore senseless to criticize Maruyama's account of Japan using Foucault's theory. It is foolish to celebrate Lacan and Barthes's comments on Japan without taking into account the problematic of the power engendered by foreclosure. Then, how on earth does "telling the truth" or "not having anything to hide" in Lacan's sense function in the power structure? In this sense, Motoori Norinaga's critique of the Chinese spirit can be taken as an example. "People are satisfied with saying knowing things. Knowing people in the world tend to say things with pretentious resignation, reciting vulgar poetry such as moral poetry [doka]. Considering that their lives are secure, they recite their peaceful states of mind achieved through their mental awakening--such is all hypocrisy, a flattery to Confucianism and Buddhism. In truth there is no one with a secured life who knows perfect satisfaction. For instance, even people who have lived until the age of 70?ucky and rare?annot feel that they have lived enough; it is human nature to want to live until 90 or 100, lamenting the shortness of the rest of life." (Tamakatsuma) According to Motoori, dying is simply sad. There is nothing to hide here. From such a stance, all religions are hypocritical. This position denies all thought that seeks to overcome the fear of dying as hypocritical and artificial. This also considers all power as artifice, thus hypocrisy. The point is that, nevertheless, this does not assume the denial of power. It considers all the movements against power as equally artificial and hypocritical; this consistently reveals the artifice (=Chinese spirit) of anti-power and in turn affirms the present power structure because of its exposed truth--impurity and contradiction. Motoori also denied to change the status quo of the Tokugawa sovereignty at the same time as attacking Confucianists and advocating the ancient way. In this precise manner, the "absence of repression" represses those who resist repression. It is only hypocrisy to demonstrate nothingness philosophically by bracketing the particular power structure. Even Nishida Kitaro applied the "place of nothingness" to political signification. "In the history of our nation, the imperial household has consistently assumed the being of nothing--the self-identity of contradictories." (The Problem of Japanese Culture) Nishida wanted to say that the imperial household was not a political power, but rather the being of nothing behind the ever alternating political power. Although during the Meiji Constitution it appeared like an absolute monarchy, it was distinguished from Western and Chinese monarchies in its being nothing. Nishida wanted to stress that in the Great East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, the imperial household had to exist like a zero sign that unified autonomous Asian nations, instead of reigning over them as a ruling power. Nishida's interpretation did not function outside Japan, nor will it ever in the future. Those who admire Nishida today tend to dehistoricize and depoliticize his philosophy and market it to Westerners as an Oriental philosophy. It is understandable that those who are within a system of repression yearn for the absence of repression. But this assessment has nothing to do with those who are within a power structure engendered by the absence of repression--thus one that is not universal. It is evident that Japan can not survive the coming global circumstances as long as it preserves the structure of the Tenno system. The words Sakaguchi Ango wrote right after the War are still vivid in our time. "People of the Japanese nation! I cry for the fall of the Japanese people as well as the nation. Japan and the Japanese people must fall! Inasmuch as the Tenno system persists and the historical device functions as being entangled within the idea of Japan, the full blossoming of humanity and humanness is not possible here. The human light is shuttered eternally; human happiness, human agony, all the true human features, will never arrive at Japan." (Theory of Decline II) DRAFT TRANSLATION Sabu Kohso ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Return to Colloquium http://www.karataniforum.org/fl.html �� �後後� �짯後� �後� �碻碻碻� �碻碻� �� �� ┛┗ �� �� �� �� |